First, Do No Harm
by LauraHuntORI
Summary: What does a man do, when he can no longer pursue his profession? John Gant must face the 'cure' imposed on him by Dr. Luke Canfield.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note: **_If I woke up in the morning and nothing hurt, I would think I was dead._

**Disclaimer: **I don't own these characters. Go buy and watch the original film. It will do no harm to increase Audie Murphy's reputation.

* * *

The pain was terrific.

He had never felt anything remotely like its furious intensity before, and John Gant was something of a connoisseur. Each movement of the horse caused a rocket to explode just below his right shoulder, and he kept looking at his arm to make sure it was still attached. He couldn't feel it, couldn't differentiate a sensation of the limb's presence from the sea of agony in which it floated.

He watched blood drip from his hand onto his horse's shoulder. He would have to tell them at the livery stable in Wickenburg to take special care currying the animal. Lord knew he'd not be able to do it himself, but they'd done a fine job a few days back when he'd passed through on his way to Lordsburg.

Lordsburg. His horse stumbled, and the extra movement needed to keep himself in the saddle made Gant gasp. He smiled a little, painfully, as everything was painful right at the minute. Drat that Physician anyway. What had happened to _'First, Do No Harm'?_

He checked the angle of the sun. It wouldn't set for hours yet, but he thought he was probably at least twelve miles still from Wickenburg. He shot an appraising glance at the mass of misery that clung to him like an evil cloud. He thought his sleeve was beginning to look tight under its decoration of dried blood. He swallowed hard. Perhaps he should have let the Physician see to it after all, but… he'd not been able to face it. Not after—

Memory flared. Momma's outstretched arms offering to comfort him, mere moments after having thrashed him for some childish prank. He'd backed away from her, and hidden himself in the barn for two days, until Father had pointed out that the food was better in the house. He'd seen his friends and siblings accept such comfort after correction, and wondered at it.

Pain and comfort couldn't come from the same hands…

…could they?

Comfort.

He craved it.

He thought of the book he'd read last Christmas: _Comfort … is given … to other kinds of men than you. _

* * *

It was the horse's sensible equine memory of the comfort of the Wickenburg Livery Stable that brought them safely into town.

Gant had reached and exceeded the end of his strength well before he spied the doctor's shingle. He praised himself for his good memory. He'd thought there was a doctor here. It was good fortune to find two doctors so close together in this territory.

At least Gant _hoped _it was good fortune.

_'Don't hope,' _his best friend Lam had been fond of saying, back in the days when that lamentably named youth had still lived. 'Not hoping' hadn't helped Lam.

J. C. Veldboom, M.D. the shingle read.

Gant hoped Dr. Veldboom was as skilled as the 'beloved phyisician and apostle' Luke.

It wasn't only his arm that was hurting.

* * *

Gant did not fall off his horse.

He dismounted.

But not gracefully.

Nor without pain.

A lot of pain.

He stood a moment, leaning against the beast's silky black shoulder. "God give me strength," he whispered, his usage of the Almighty's name not vain, but a prayer. He pulled in air through his open mouth, and pushed it back out the same way.

There were seven stairs yet up to the doctor's door.

He must gird himself for the great battle.

* * *

The heavy iron door knocker was in the shape of a hand holding a fetterlock. Gant lifted the faux manacle and banged it against the fine-grained wood of the door, wondering why he couldn't black out like a normal person.

A spectacled young woman opened up and eyed him with disfavor. "I not know you," she said. "What name?"

"John Gant," he said, before remembering that it was now dangerous to use his real name, that he was helpless and defenseless in a decidedly unfriendly world.

"Your wife having baby, Mr. Gant?"

_Wha— _"I haven't any wife," he managed to get out before she interrupted him.

"Not baby? Then why such banging?"

Gant blinked at her. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. Despite the pain where his arm formerly was, he found he couldn't say it. Couldn't pronounce the necessary words.

Couldn't admit he was hurt.

"Well?" she asked. The woman's low voice carried a trace of an accent that slowed down her speech, despite the brusque tone.

He ignored her in favor of looking at his arm to verify that it was still attached.

"I see it," she said. "Come inside, Mr. Gant."

* * *

"Shirt and vest come off, so I see arm."

When he didn't move, she continued, "You want I cut off?"

He shot her a look filled with alarm.

She made a guttural noise of exasperation. "Mijn God. Cut off sleeve, cut off vest, not cut off arm."

He loosed a sigh of relief. "I think I can take them off, if you'll help me."

The heavy vest scraped against his injured arm agonizingly, but he'd had it made specially and was grateful it was not damaged.

The dark blue shirt, dyed with expensive indigo was likewise saved, Gant hissing as she peeled it down his injured arm.

When he realized he was avoiding looking at it, Gant turned and contemplated the swollen, blackened mess that was his upper arm. His former gun arm.

He was a dead man.

_Thou shalt not suffer a helpless gunfighter to live._

Meanwhile, the spectacled young woman frowned and muttered something Gant didn't catch.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, was that question?"

She raised a hand to scratch her cheek thoughtfully and forced out a heavy breath before repeating, "I ask why I become doktor?"

Her patient was surprised into a chuckle. "I don't know, ma'am." He smiled at her. "Kind of stupid, wasn't it?"

She stared at him a moment, puzzled by the amusement in his pain filled eyes. She nodded towards his injury with her head. "Is bullet in there?"

"No, ma'am."

"Goed." The light touch of her fingers on his arm made his jaw clench. So he _could_ feel the limb after all. As the examination continued, he thought he might faint, or throw up, but he did neither, only breathed deeply, in and out.

"You scream, is no shame," she told him, before _wrenching _ his arm.

Gant's guttural cry was less a scream than a kind of long groan. He leaned his head against the doctor's bosom. His breath shuttered in and out.

"Brave jongen," she praised him. "You very lucky."

"Yeah," he said, his 'agreement' riding the surface of a heavy sigh. She did not push him away, so he listened to her steady breaths and tried to match his to them… the pain did seem… _less. _It wasn't gone, but—

"Can move hand now?"

He tried and to his relief succeeded in closing his fist.

She grunted in satisfaction. "Goed. Now you rest." Her ministrations had taken place, not on an examination table, but on a huge, ornate, curtained bed set in the middle of her front parlor. She pulled two of the pillows from behind him, and placed them one on top of the other along his side. She pushed him back so he lay with his head on the remaining pillow, then carefully lifted his injured arm and placed it gently atop the stacked pillows.

"Arm stay above chest, you stay in bed, yes?"

"Yes."

She pulled the sheet and blanket up around him, then seated herself in a chair nearby.

"How it happen?" she asked.

"A man threw a rounding hammer at me."

Above the spectacles, the broad brow furrowed. "Luke do this?"

The answer came on a chuff of laughter. "Yes, do you know Dr. Canfield?" Stupid question, really. She obviously did.

Dr. Veldboom ignored his unnecessary query in favor of posing one of her own. "How come he not fix?"

For a few moments there was no answer.

Not 'why did he do it?' but 'why didn't he fix it?' An interesting woman, this doctor.

"He offered to, but I wouldn't let him," Gant admitted.

The doctor cocked her head and considered her patient afresh. "Luke is geode doktor. I tink you must be very stupid man."

For some reason, that also made him laugh. "Yes, ma'am, I am. Makes us a pair, doesn't it?"

* * *

"You like whiskey or laudanum?"

"Neither, thank you."

"It numb pain," she explained, as if she thought he hadn't understood her.

"I don't mind pain."

"Only stupid person want be in pain."

"We agreed I was, remember?"


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's Note:** _"To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace."_ ― Malcolm X

**Disclaimer: **I don't own these characters. Go buy and watch the original film.

* * *

Judge Benson had believed he'd gotten away with his crimes. He'd fled the city, fled the state, fled into the West, and taken his ill-gotten gains and his daughter with him. Consumption, if it was ultimately to put a period to his existence, had given him respectability as health could never have done, for what could be more natural than a consumptive seeking cure for his ailing lungs in the high, dry air of the West?

He had been wrong. He knew it now, as he had not known it when John Gant arrived in town. After all, it _could _have been someone else the gunman sought…. It could have been. Many men had enemies, not just men like himself, a distinguished man of the bar and bench, who had purported to dispense justice while lining his own pockets and those of his friends.

Oh, he'd not sent men to their deaths, that he knew of. He had not soiled his hands with mere matters of life and death. Vulgar crime was handled by vulgar judges in the refined cities of the East. No, Judge Benson's court had handled only matters of property. Money and land and the coercion that takes money and land from the weak and gives it to the strong. Protection, for those who can afford to pay for it, and the back of the judicial hand for those who could not.

And if eventually the reckoning had come due, and his life was required in exchange, at least he had had the satisfaction of paying with dignity, with honor, without the need for Anne to even know what he'd done. Any man may be struck down by disease, the worthy and the unworthy alike. It was no judgement of Heaven that had stricken his lungs, but only chance. Even after Gant's arrival, and the man's questions to Anne, the Judge had decided only that the necessary matter of his death could be raised almost to a sort of sainthood: expunging his past sins by nobly sacrificing his seemingly blameless self in the holy cause of ridding the world of an evil gunman.

No need for the Judge to fight for a life already lost. Gant had no power over him as he'd had over Stricker, Pierce, or Chaffee. Yet, in his heart of hearts, he knew it was himself he'd described to Luke, as much as Gant. His own viciousness, though no longer active, remained a progressive disease demanding his death all the same. It was justice, he reasoned, for him to die to stop another such as himself from doing harm to the innocent.

But he'd been wrong, so wrong.

Gant _did _have power over him: Anne. Anne, who had had no part in his crimes, had been forced—_forced!—_ to pay the price for them, sacrificed in her turn to Gant's depravity.

She was the child of his old age. The child he'd thought never to have.

He had used women in his time, many of them. Trashy women, no better than they should be, out for what they could get.

He'd never held a woman in high regard until Anne's mother, and when she had died, all the Judge's love, all the love he'd ever felt for anyone in his whole life, had come to rest in their little girl, now a woman herself, loved by a man finer than her father could ever be.

A woman despoiled and destroyed by Gant, as the judge himself had destroyed the lives of those who'd come before his bench.

And why?

For no reason but money.

Judge Benson had come full circle: he had reaped what he himself had sown, case by dishonest case, person by betrayed person, grief by uncomforted grief.

Benson wept. He hadn't meant it to happen! He'd only meant to protect her! He shuddered and wailed as his mind conjured again the long fingers pulling the strip of lace from its hiding place in the dark vest.

"Does it hurt, Dad?"

His eyes, which had seemed glued shut, flew open. "Anne!"

She smiled down at him from the side of the bed. "I'm right here, Dad, you don't have to shout."

He stared at her stupidly. He wanted to ask if she was hurt, to ask what Gant had done to her, to ask if she'd been— but she was obviously fine. Had he dreamed it? He cleared his throat, and began, hesitantly, "Did Gant—?"

"He's gone, Dad," she interrupted. "Luke hit his gun arm with a hammer, and he rode away."

The Judge blinked. "He had a piece of your dress."

She sighed. "I found your letter and went to confront him. Told him you wouldn't fight him, so he'd have to kill you in cold blood and get hanged for his pains. He said he'd have to do something about that and tore my dress to make you think he'd… _done something _to me, but he didn't. Just tied me up, shoved me in the closet, and left."

"Very clever," the judge remarked wanly.

"It certainly worked on you, from what Luke says. You took after him with a shotgun. Do you remember?"

He remembered. All too well. His horror, and Gant's smirk.

The pain in his chest.

The heavy weapon dipping toward the plank floor of the porch.

The stairs rising towards his face.

"How come I'm not dead?" the judge asked, mildly.

She giggled. "Asa said it must be due to clean living."

Judge Benson shook his head. "No, I'm quite sure it's not due to that."


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's Note: **"In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O LORD, who for our sins art justly displeased?" – _from _The Order for The Burial of the Dead, 1789 U.S. Book of Common Prayer

**Disclaimer: ** I don't own these characters. Go buy and watch the original film.

* * *

Asa Canfield made no effort to be quiet as he entered the house, but despite the noise of the slamming door, Luke failed to look up. The blacksmith stood still a moment, studying his son's profile as he sat at the table, conning his book. Such a good boy, Luke had always been, and he'd grown into such a fine man, such a fine, caring doctor. Any man would be proud to have such a son.

Silence pooled in the heavy stillness of the parlor, the only noise the ticking of the clock and Asa's own heartbeat. Luke didn't so much as turn the page.

Though not normally given to soft speech, Asa sent his quietest voice forth into the room. "What are you reading, son? Trying to find something that will help the judge?"

Luke's head remained bent over his book, but to answer his father's question, he read aloud the words he'd been contemplating for the past hour and more. "Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery." Asa caught his breath while his son continued, unnoticing. "He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay."

"There's no need for that, surely? The judge isn't dead?"

"No," Luke admitted. "The judge isn't… but what about Gant?" Finally, the younger man looked up and met his father's worried eyes with his own troubled orbs. "Did you find him?"

"Not a trace."

Luke looked back down at the prayer book and swallowed. "It's my fault. I should never have let him leave."

"How could you have stopped him, son?" Asa asked, reasonably. "You were injured yourself, don't forget."

Luke's hand was drawn to hover over the wound near his armpit, where Gant's carefully placed bullet had torn his flesh, just enough to make him drop the hammer, not enough to do any lasting damage. Not a killing wound, not even close. The least possible amount of force, from a weapon not noted for nuance. Gant had done only as much damage as he needed to do to get away.

And Luke? He who had sworn to 'do no harm' had sent his hammer sailing needlessly after the man, to crush his arm, and leave him defenseless before his enemies.

And Gant had not even shot the judge, merely left him passed out on the steps.

He had been so ready to blame Gant for everything that had happened: for Pierce's suicide, for the shooting of Buck Hastings (though in truth it was the sheriff who had drawn on Gant, when there had been no real legal excuse for his ordering Gant to leave town), for the fight between Chaffee and Stricker, literally for everything that had happened, Luke had blamed Gant.

If a sparrow had fallen—If a cloud had floated across the sun, he would have blamed the little stranger with the cynical view of mankind, and the black hat and black horse.

Why?

Gant had not drawn on Fraden.

He had not harmed Anne, and he certainly had had plenty of opportunity to do so, had he so chosen.

He had not shot the judge, though that was what he had 'been paid to do.'

"A lot of people would like to kill John Gant," Luke remembered the little man saying in parting, as though he were speaking of someone else, "but it took a healer with a hammer to make it easy for them."

Guilt crushed the brawny, young physician, as his hammer had crushed Gant's arm.

Asa, confident that the gunman had not come for him, nor for his son, had said from the beginning that that they should give the young stranger a chance, and form their own opinions based on his actions towards them instead of his reputation. No one had listened. Not the sheriff, not the townsmen, and in the end, not Luke himself.

Yet Gant had done little in their town save drink endless cups of coffee and play chess. He had not so much as gambled or taken a drink of strong waters. He merely sat and watched as men tore themselves and each other apart around him.

"He's not your responsibility, son." Luke might have forgotten his father, but the older man was still there, watching and sympathizing.

"Why do I feel like he is?" The young man rubbed his forehead with anxious fingers. "How could I have misjudged him so?"

Asa knew what he meant. Meaning to comfort, he laid his hand lightly on his son's good shoulder. "You didn't know, son."

Almost involuntarily, Luke shrugged his father's hand off. He didn't want comfort, didn't deserve it. He wanted only to understand. "Why was I so ready to blame him? I watched him with Lou Fraden. He didn't make Fraden draw."

"He wasn't paid to," Asa reminded him.

"No, Dad, look: Gant draws on men who draw on him, but he can't _really_ make another man draw on him. That the man has to decide for himself."

"What about the judge? Did he 'decide for himself'?"

Luke sighed. "No. Gant was in the wrong there, of course... but Anne said she went there with a gun, to _kill _Gant, yet he didn't harm her... or the judge, really... and _I_ did harm _him_.

"I blamed him for everything, and now... now I feel as if I'm the one to blame."

"You're not."

Luke sighed. "I just wish…"

"What?"

"That I knew he was all right."

"I'm sure he's fine, son."

"And what if he's not? What if he's dead? Am I a killer, too?"


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note: **_He hath broken my bones_. – Lamentations 3:4b KJV

**Disclaimer: ** I don't own these characters. Go buy and watch the original film.

* * *

John Gant couldn't move, but it seemed more a problem of pressure than pain.

Considering the matter carefully behind closed eyes, Johnnie wondered if he really wanted to move. _She _had told him to stay in bed. _She… _the gruff lady doctor.

Perhaps she had splinted his arm after all, though he did not remember her doing so.

His right arm was elevated—he remembered _that. _And it hurt—ached, stung— he remembered _that _as well. He could move the fingers of his right hand, and he did so, just a bit. Smooth sheeting, a pillowcase, under his fingertips.

She had lifted his arm to rest on pillows, he recalled.

What was the pressure against the right side of his chest? He'd not been wounded there. But it felt… _heavy _somehow. Had she strapped his arm to his chest?

It didn't feel like that.

He would have to open his eyes if he wanted to see, but for now he liked the darkness behind his closed eyes, so contented himself with exploring merely by touch, and that sixth sense that told him how his body felt and where his limbs were positioned.

There was more pressure along his left leg. Since his left arm and hand were undamaged he allowed the long fingers of his left hand to explore freely among the warm quilts he remembered vaguely from… last night? Yesterday? How long had he slept?

The pressure against his leg was topped by something hard and not quite round, covered in soft, delicate strings like the silk atop a ripe corn cob. He rubbed the silk between sensitive fingertips.

He heard what sounded like a child's sigh, and his mind summoned from the distant past the image of himself and Lam, who for friendship's sake had come to lie next to him on the fragrant hay in the loft during his long ago self-imposed exile.

Lam could not be here.

He was dead.

Shot by a man who had claimed it was self-defense.

Gant's eyes flickered open.

He was awake, and it was now. His right arm remained atop the barrier of cushions, but inside that barrier, the weight he'd felt pressing intimately against his side was a small boy whose own tiny arm was splayed across Gant's bare chest. A second, slightly larger boy slept curled around the former gunman's left leg, Gant's long fingers caressing his hair.

In the dim light, he could see that the chair across from the bed was occupied by a girl without spectacles, but otherwise in appearance very similar to the doctor, though much younger. She smiled at him encouragingly, but when he opened his mouth to ask her name, she pressed a finger to her lips.

Gant looked at her puzzled. The front room was very quiet already, and he was awake, so—

Maybe she didn't want him to wake the boys.

"Is wanted man?" The doctor's irritated tone flowed in from the next room, not loud, but its timbre one that carried.

"Not officially." Gant did not recognize the voice. He cocked his head against his pillow, looking his silent question at the girl, who'd obviously been listening for some time.

She mouthed the answer: _Sheriff. _

_Ah._ Gant nodded his understanding, then heard her mother in the next room saying clearly, "Then you not take him."

"He's dangerous, Anna."

Gant frowned. Not to _her_ he wasn't.

"How?" Gant hadn't spoken. It was _Anna_, if that was the doctor's name… and if it was, why did her shingle say 'J. C. Veldboom'?

"Men have died at his hands."

The doctor laughed. "They die at my hands, too."

"You know that's different, doc. He's a _gunfighter_."

"Not different to the dead. And he not gunfighter now. Need arm for to shoot gun. He safe."

"He's not sa—"

"He safe," she repeated, emphatically.

In the darkened parlor, Gant smiled. _Safe. _

He felt safe, for the first time in a very long time.

Across from the bed, the girl smiled back at him. Silently, her mouth formed the words: _Momma will keep you safe. _

Gant nodded, because he knew she was right.

And he was still very tired.

So, since he was _safe_, he allowed his eyes to drift shut again, and returned to sleep.

In his dream, Lam slumbered safely beside him.

* * *

"You dead, Mr. Gant?" the doctor's voice asked, from quite close by.

He felt rather dead, but answered, "Not yet."

"But soon, eh?"

He opened his eyes the better to smile up at her. "Soon we all will be," he replied impishly.

She made a sound halfway between a grunt and a snort, and he realized that he loved her. Loved her grumpiness, and her accent, and her bluestocking appearance, for a less Luke Canfield-like member of the medical profession _could not _have existed.

Gant inclined his head towards the tray she'd placed on the bedside table. "Is that coffee for me?" he asked hopefully.

She frowned. "What you t'ink? I go out and slop pigs wit' it?"

He laughed. "You never know. May I sit up to drink it, please?"

"No, I just prop a lil more." She leaned close over him to adjust his pillow. She must use a lavender sachet for her linens: he could smell it.

"Thank you," he whispered, feeling suddenly shy at her closeness, though it was ridiculous: she'd help him undress.

Her coffee was strong, and its uncompromising black bitterness eased his parched throat as mere water could never have done. The squeezing sensation he'd felt beginning to threaten his brain receded.

Might as well grab the bull by the horns. "What did the sheriff want?"

One corner of the mobile mouth tucked itself into a half-frown, while the other flattened out in disdain at his unnecessary pretense. "What you t'ink?"

Gant looked away from the accusation in the doctor's cool gray eyes, opting to study the interior of his empty coffee cup instead. "The judge is dead, I suppose." It wasn't a question.

"You want wire your employer?" Her voice dripped scorn.

"I didn't kill him." Gant wondered why he was bothering to offer an excuse. He _had _in fact gone to Lordsburg for the specific purpose of effecting the old man's death, so—

"No, you didn't," Anna agreed. "He not dead."


End file.
